Kitchen Sink Alchemy

One of the sets I’ve made for the film is a 70s kitchen. Part of the fun in building miniature sets is trying to think of objects in terms of their shapes rather than their names or functions. It helps the construction process along if you can link shapes you’ll need for your set to shapes in the real world. Because their scales are so different, this requires a little shift in thinking, or some creative brainstorming. If the shape already exists as something else, then there’s no point making it from scratch. Especially fun is rescuing things that were going to be thrown out. There’s a certain thrill in the alchemy of turning garbage into something pretty.

For example: this kitchen sink above. The sink is actually a single-serving yoghurt container. OK, I bought the yoghurt just for this purpose, but it was still pretty cool to find JUST the right shape already sitting there on a shelf in the grocery store. I had to chop it in half to make it more shallow, but it worked out pretty well.

The drain of the sink is made from a random plastic thing that I noticed on the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure what to use, and I guess that sink drain was in the back of my mind while going for a walk in the neighbourhood… because I just happened to see it, this tiny piece of black plastic by my feet, and think Wow, that would make the perfect drain! (Isn’t my life exciting!)

The faucet and handles were taken from toys: I had a kid’s firetruck from a junk store that I tore apart for its plastic parts, some of which I used for these handles. I used some armature wire for the neck of the faucet, and a decapitated toy pylon for the base. All plastic parts were assembled with 5-minute epoxy, then spraypainted silver.

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0 thoughts on “Kitchen Sink Alchemy”

my friend sven just turned me on to your site….really cool of you to share your process and pics and lessons learned….(love the sink!).

my husbancd ane i are just finishing up (after almost 3 years!!!) our first stop motion short film which we are documenting at justinrasch.blogspot.com, and we too have found the stop mo community to be lovely and invaluable in the process.

welcome to the blog scene! i’m looking forward to reading more of your posts.

Shel — congrats on almost finishing your & your husband’s first short film! And for sending your blog — I look forward to reading more 🙂 Interesting to hear about TV production; the idea of shooting 10 seconds a day is pretty mindblowing to me. Amazing. (BTW, I love Robot Chicken!)